One of my clients, a globally operating tech company, often staffs project teams from different plants and countries to customize their product according to specific needs of their customers. Often team members have never met before, so getting to know each other and breaking the ice is an issue. In this case it was about a project with a deadline of 1.5 years and 90 team members from 5 European branches. Due to this duration the team was given an office space at one of the sites to intensify collaboration.

When discussing the team’s needs, it turned out that this office space was due for renovation anyway. The office building was a typical 80s concrete structure with light walls for separating areas. Changes were easy to apply. Given that, the idea for the event emerged: A virtual journey to different places that would represent the four topics the team wished to cover. Purpose, Set-up, Governance and Communication were the stopovers that would finally lead to the design of the office space, based on the results of these four stops.

As almost always with events of this dimension, I asked for volunteers from the team to co-facilitate breakout groups. Four places represented the four topics. The virtual journey to these places would start with storytelling to frame the team’s tasks. Participants built their organization (set-up) out of materials provided, simulating operating in hierarchical structures (governance) and the like. After two intense days of fun, commitment and enthusiasm the group ended up with the design of their office space, based on their learnings from the previous stopovers of their journey. A little side note: Getting volunteers involved out of the participants group is advantageous in many ways: Own involvement instead of consuming something pre-designed, knowledge transfer to and within the team, empowerment and self-managed learning are key words here. It might even happen that a team is perfectly fit to run the entire event themselves, with me as coach and back-up in the background, leaving the stage to the people. From my point of view, this is ideal: the consultant functions as a coach, enabling the team to self-steer and learn.